Reza Vali was born in Ghazvin, Iran in 1952 and teaches composition at the School of Music, Carnegie Mellon University. Much of his music combines ethnic folk music and Western classical music.

Franco-American composer, music theorist, and sometime-conductor Edgard (Edgar) Varèse (1883-1965) came to the United States in 1915 and composed most of his mature music in America. In fact, most of what he wrote prior to the move has been lost and is presumed destroyed. Varèse pioneered 20th Century electronic music and had to wait for technology to catch up to his conceptualizations in order to realize performance of many of his works. His influence extended beyond "classical" music and both Charlie Parker and Frank Zappa acknowledged Varèse's contributions to their own work.

Russian 20th Century composer and conductor Sergei Nikiforovich Vasilenko (1872-1956) was, like Rachmaninov, once conductor of the Mamontov Opera. His Asiatic influences are shown in the Chinese Suite and the Hindu Suite. He wrote five operas, the best known probably being Christopher Columbus, and a number of ballets, choral pieces, and other works.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born 12 October 1872 at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, England. He may have been the foremost English composer of his generation and certainly keyed the revival of English music during the twentieth century. He used the folk and common music of the land to great effect in many of his later compositions. Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

Brazilian composer Glauco Velasquez (1884-1914) was the illegitimate son of Portuguese baritone Eduardo Medina Ribas and the Adelina Alambary Luz. She gave birth in Naples and later adopted her own son, concealing his origins. Velasquez was trained in Europe and his style is closer to Paris than to the Rio de Janeiro of his day. He died of tuberculosis even as his own style began to blossom.

Puerto Rican composer Guillermo Venegas Lloveras (1915-1993) was largely self-taught, both as a musician (especially the guitar) and as poet and thinker (whose poetic and philosophical works were published during his lifetime). He spent his younger years playing and writing popular dance and vocal music. As he grew older, he turned more toward classical forms, writing mainly for guitar, piano, and voice.

Giuseppe Verdi was born in La Roncole, Parma, Italy in 1813. He is most noted for his twenty-eight operas, the music of many being familiar even to those with no interest in opera. He also composed instrumental and religious music. Verdi died in 1901.

Hungarian composer Sándor Veress was born 1 February 1907 in Kolozsvár. Prior to World War Two, he worked with Béla Bartók at the Hungarian Academy of Science. He left Hungary in 1949 and lived and worked in Switzerland, the United States, and Australia. Veress died in Berne in 1992.

Spanish organist and Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria (c.1548-1611) left a brilliant catalogue of exclusively religious music. While some would argue which of the Masses, the motets, Magnificats, hymns, or other works were his best form, scholars and lovers of Renaissance church music agree on the beauty of his work. An indication of his contemporary support comes in our knowledge that essentially all of his music was published during his lifetime, showing the impact of rich and devoted patrons.

Irish composer and scholar Gerard Victory (1921-1995) was known not only for his music but for his all-encompasing intellectual prowess. He wrote orchestral, solo, and other music, operas, choral works, and songs. Many of his works include lyrics in his native Irish Gaelic as well as in English.

Louis Vierne was born in Poitiers, France in 1870. He followed Cesar Franck and Charles Marie Widor as the foremost organ composer of France, especially on the newer "symphonic" organs. Some of Vierne's students gained as much or more fame than did he. Among them were Marcel Dupre, Joseph Bonnet, Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Durufle, Gaston Litaize and Jean Langlais. He suffered a massive stroke and died on the organ bench during a 1937 concert.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was born on 5 March 1887 in the Laranjeiras neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. A gifted child, he learned to play cello on a viola specially adapted by his father at age six. He also received and took to heart Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, a gift from his aunt that would have a life-long influence, especially on his Bachianas Brasileiras. As he matured, Villa-Lobos learned to incorporate ever more of Brazil's native and national music into his compositions while also growing more confident in his own abilities. He died 17 November 1959.

Born in 1954 in Perth, Western Australia, Carl Vine studied piano with Sephen Dornan and composition with John Exton at the University of Western Australia. While he has composed for larger instrumental ensembles, his emphasis remained upon piano, including solo works.

(1705-1741) Italian violinist, harpsichord and organ player, conductor and composer. His preserved works are 114 cantatas for various ensembles and 19 concertos for different instruments, 8 operas, 2 oratoriae, several serenades and nearly 10 sacred works.

Latvian composer Jazeps Vitols (Joseph Wihtol, 1863-1948) played an important role in integrating Latvian music with that of the wider world during the Late Romantic Period and into the 20th Century. His influence upon Latvian music was so great that the Latvian Conservatory of Music, which he founded in 1919, was renamed Jazepa Vitola Latvijas Muzikas Akademija, the Jazeps Vitols Academy of Music. Furthering the honors, the Academy sponsors a piano competition named for its founder--who was also a virtuoso pianist.

Medieval composer Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) was also a noted theorist and generally considered one of the intellectual giants of his time. He receives much credit for the development of the motet--which also happens to be the only surviving form of music attributed to him. His ideas for new forms of rhythmic notation and new schemes of rhythm were codified in the seminal work Ars Nova, which lent its name to an entire period of musical history.

Often called the "Red Priest" because of hair color and early vocation, Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi was born in 1648 and spent most of his adult life teaching music at a girls' orphanage in Venice. During a period of outstanding creativity and virtuoso performers, Vivaldi may have overshadowed almost all of them except Johann Sebastian Bach. Vivaldi developed the concerto into its modern form and produced some of the most familiar music from the period, including his "Four Seasons." He outlived his fame and died in 1741. Ironically, just as it took Mendelssohn to restore Bach to his place among composers, it was Bach's transcriptions that kept Vivaldi's memory alive until his music once again stood on its own feet, beginning in the 1800s.

Kevin Volans was born in 1949 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. After spending the mid-1970s in Germany, he came to Ireland and established citizenship.